Visit the Oakland Museumâs Mechanical Musical Instrument exhibit that ran December 16, 1972 through February 4, 1973. Organized over a two year period by the museumâs curator, Gretchen Schneider, the exhibit held around eighty varieties of mechanical instruments from the turn of the (19th) century. Charles Amirkhanian visits the museum to interview Schneider and demonstrates a variety of the tunes played by the musical machines.
Instruments on display range from the largest band organ to the smallest bird box, including the Lyon & Healy Empress Electric Orchestrion, Wurlitzer Model 165 Band Organ, Mira Music Box.

Originally broadcast on January 25, 1973 for KPFA and KPFB.
Additional broadcast: May 7, 1973.


This audio is part of the collection: Other Minds Audio Archive
It also belongs to collections: Music & Arts; stream_only

Date: 1973-01-23
Keywords: Oakland Museum; mechanical instruments; KPFA 1973; radiom.org; barrel organ; electric orchestrion; Wurlitzer; turnaphone

Creative Commons license: Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs

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Reviewer: mostawesomenoah - - August 8, 2011
Subject: an Awesome Glimps into the Past
That is a pretty awesome glimps into the passed! I was at my Nanna's house when I heard this. I couldn't hear it at home because I have something fore the blind called the braillenote, it's like a laptop fore the blind, and it doesn't have that much memory, thairfore I couldn't stream the m3u file, and their isn't a download link. Now that I have a computer running JAWS fore windows, a screen reading sofftware made fore the blind buy a brand named Fredom Scientific, I can listen to it at home, and write a review. I was alwaze enterested in machenary like this, so musical, and suffistacated yet amazing.